Sabrent’s New Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2 Delivers 64TB of PCIe 4.0 Storage

Right now the sweet spot for price and performance with SSDs is 1TB, as these drives are fast and affordable. That’s clearly not enough storage for some people though. (Definitely not – Ed) To answer the needs of those with projects as large as their bank accounts, Sabrent has announced the Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2. It’s the second iteration of the company’s add-in PCIe hardware RAID solution. It packs hold up to eight SSDs, including eight 8TB Sabrent Rocket 4 drives. This configuration allows it to offer 64TB of stupid-fast NVME storage. Although it can be a bootable device, it’s not recommended for obvious reason. Instead, it should be used for large projects demanding plentiful sequential throughput.

The Destroyer 2 is a collaboration with Highpoint, as it uses a Highpoint SD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 RAID card along with its own SSDs. There’s also a Broadcom PCIe 4.0 8 series PEX switch that manages the eight M.2 drives. The entire apparatus is naked in photos, but it includes a full length aluminum heatsink with thermal pads and active cooling. Despite the cooler, it’s still a single-slot PCIe add-in card. Though we’re not sure how long it is, it is reported to be the same length as a high-end GPU. Those are typically around 12 inches or so, depending on the model. The Destroyer 2 supports M.2 SSDs in the following lengths: 2242, 2260, and 2280. It goes into a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot and requires a six-pin PCIe power connector for the SSDs.

Since higher-capacity drives typically deliver better performance due to increased parallelism, you will probably get the best results with Sabrent’s 8TB drive. Still, that’s a $1,999 SSD, (currently only $1,499 on Amazon). Eight of them would set you back $12,000, so hopefully your boss won’t mind seeing that on an expense report. When this puppy is fully loaded it can hit over 28GB/s of sequential throughput. That is roughly four times the maximum possible with PCIe 4.0, which can hit 7GB/s. Interestingly the previous Destroyer had similar benchmarks, so we’re not sure what’s different this time. Tom’s Hardware notes that it offers “slightly better performance,” but it’s not quantified. It is clarified that you can use PCIe 3.0 drives too, so PCIe 4.0 is not required. However, for such an investment it seems shortsighted to use slower drives.

The most unique feature of the Destroyer 2 is that once you’ve formatted the array, you can drop the card in any system and it’s ready to go to work. The formatting and RAID creation is done with Highpoint’s browser-based RAID management software. It’s capable of various RAID levels including all the usual suspects, including RAID 10. It’s not clear what the Destroyer 2 will cost, and what the various configurations will be. Hopefully Sabrent releases more information shortly, as it could make a fun top-tier upgrade for those tired of waiting for PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

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